GuShiio.com ① Intuition Machines ‘”Athena” lander successfully landed on the moon, but its status was not confirmed, and its share price plummeted by more than 20%;
② “Athena” is the company’s second lunar landing probe. The first lander, Odysseus, capsized in February last year and failed to complete its mission.
Financial Union, March 7 (Editor Niu Zhanlin)Shares of U.S. space exploration company Intuitive Machines plunged more than 20% intraday trading on Thursday, the biggest decline in a year. The company’s “Athena” lander has successfully landed on the surface of the moon, but its status cannot be confirmed at present.
This is also the second lunar landing probe launched by the Intuition Machine. The first lander, Odysseus, landed on the moon in February last year, but accidentally capsized and failed to complete its scheduled mission.
It is reported that the six-legged landing design makes Athena more flexible and carries 11 scientific instruments and payloads, including drilling equipment used to detect water and ice on the lunar surface.
The success of this mission will have a significant impact on the future development of Intuition Machines. If current problems can be solved, the success of the mission will win more business opportunities and reputation for the company.
“It looks like we’ve landed… We’re trying to assess the exact attitude of the lander on the lunar surface,” said Tim Crane, mission director and co-founder of Intuition Machines.
The lander’s engine was still running after the scheduled landing time, indicating that the lander may not have completed the landing as expected, but was in a hovering state. A few minutes later, after ordering the lander’s engines to shut down, the company confirmed that the Athena “had landed on the lunar surface,” but its exact attitude remained unclear.
On February 26, a SpaceX rocket carrying Athena was launched from Florida and followed a winding path to the moon, about 383,000 kilometers from Earth.
Before landing, NASA officials said they were aware that some low-cost missions could fail. But as more private missions go to the moon, it also brings greater flexibility and experimental opportunities.
NASA spent tens of millions of dollars on scientific instruments on the Athena and paid an additional $62 million for the moon landing.
NASA official Jackie Quinn said: “This experiment is an important milestone because it will be the first robotic drilling activity to be carried out in the lunar south pole region and is a critical step in understanding and leveraging lunar resources to support future exploration.”
At the end of February last year, the company’s Odysseus successfully landed on the moon, but unfortunately, during landing, it “fell” because one of its feet was unstable, and many of the scientific experimental equipment on board could not work properly.
Justus Parmar, CEO of venture capital firm Fortuna Investments, said that whether the intuitive machine can correct the error of the Athena lander dumping is a key issue at present. Despite the uncertainty of the mission, the company has sufficient funds and still has the opportunity to launch another lunar mission in the future.
